Eva Marie Saint, who died on Oct. 6 at age 102, lived a life that seemed exceptional in the moment and would certainly be impossible today.
First, the impossible part: Saint was, legitimately, one of the last movie stars to have played a meaningful part in the Golden Age and to have worked alongside some of its true titans. She was the on-screen romantic interest to both Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954) and Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959). Is there anyone still living who can make such a boast? When she was cast by Alfred Hitchcock in North by Northwest, she became the latest in a succession of frostily indifferent blonde types favored by the Master of Suspense, and though she was not the last of this kind — Kim Novak from Vertigo (1958) and Tippi Hedren from The Birds (1963) remain with us — she had a quality that set her apart: Her beauty was crystalline, not ostentatious; her countenance was calm, not flirty. Perhaps that is why she served as a counterweight to both the volatility of Brando and the urbanity of Grant.
Now the exceptional part: Despite having carved out for herself genuine movie stardom, Saint maintained a home life notable for its apparent normalcy. She had a single marriage, to the TV director Jeffrey Hayden (who died in 2016), and about her personal life, there was not a whisper of scandal or even much interest. This was as rare in her day as it is in ours, but her example can provide some real inspiration to any good-natured movie stars out there who wonder if such a thing is possible. True, one can no longer appear in movies with Brando, or be directed by Hitchcock, but one can still lead a decent life, even in Hollywood. Eva Marie Saint showed the way.
If there was something sublimely grounded about Saint, perhaps it can be attributed to her unexpected detour to Middle America early in her life. Although she was born in New Jersey, she went west (but not too far west) to attend Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where she cottoned to the idea of making a career on the stage. Making the trek back east, Saint turned up in a number of the significant television shows of the early 1950s — Studio One, Suspense, and such — before working with an actual Ohioan, not just a transient one, Lillian Gish, formerly of Springfield: Gish starred as Carrie Watts, an old woman plotting a visit home, in NBC’s live television drama The Trip to Bountiful (1953). Horton Foote’s drama featured Saint, appropriately named, as one of the saintly people encountered by Carrie.
Then came On the Waterfront, and her first (and only) Oscar, but the viewers watching the telecast at home must have noted that this was a rising star with her priorities in place when, upon accepting the statuette, she noted her pregnancy: “I may have the baby right here.” Thereafter, Saint picked her parts prudently. She was in Fred Zinnemann’s drama A Hatful of Rain (1957) and the epic Raintree County (1957) before her appearance in North by Northwest, in which she was far more than ornamentation: Saint’s double agent Eve Kendall has so internalized the roles that her loyalties seem to be a muddle even to herself. Seldom have the contradictions of spy craft been wrapped in so lovely a package. Saint is enchanting and often inexplicable, a blonde cipher.
Thereafter, Saint showed a preference for slightly grittier, more textured movies. She was outstanding in Otto Preminger’s saga of Israel’s founding, Exodus (1960), and plausible in domestic dramas like All Fall Down (1962) and Loving (1970). She was a credit to movies that failed her, such as the melodrama The Sandpiper (1965). That she backed away from the big screen after the early ’70s suggests that she knew what everyone else did: There was no topping working with the sort of stars she once had, so why bother?
Around the turn of the new century, Saint was tapped for movie cameos that called for a refined older lady, and she gamely obliged. She played the role well in 2006’s Superman Returns (as our hero’s mother) and in 2014’s rather woebegone cinematic condensation of Mark Helprin’s great novel Winter’s Tale. In her old age, she guarded her dignity as jealously as she had when she first came to Hollywood. Why she never received an Honorary Oscar remains a mystery — did she make too few movies, by the industry’s lights, or have too few marriages?
Now she is again in the same firmament — this time, a heavenly one — occupied by Brando, Grant, Hitchcock, and other silver-screen legends.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.